This is such a great post for me. Thanks to all of you as I really a struggeling with my Inner Child. I just can't really understand where I am at in this process of understanding now. I want so much to understand my inner child, but I am having so much trouble attatching to my "little guy".

What I feel at this stage in my healing is that I am and feel so SORRY for that "little guy" He went through so much shame, humiliation, guilt, pain and punnishment during his years of SA from his older brother. I am so sorry for him and I just wish I could have spared him from all of the CSA. I know that I did tell my mom more than once about what my brother was doing to me, but she didn't believe me. Because the abuse continued. I should have been more persistant and told more people, but I didn't. Now I am so sorry. How can I make this up to that "little guy"?

I hurt so bad inside for him. I just don't know how I can make it up to him. Hopefully I will find forgiveness some day and will be able to heal.

nI think as boys and men we all too often try to put on the 'tough guy' persona and make like we're better than that. I know this is a struggle for me. I just want to deny that I hurt -- that much.

Brian, I don't think I ever put on a tough guy persona, and I actually thought I was too emotional. I tried to convey the pain I was going through to my family & friends in so many different ways it was unbelievable. I lived the life of the hurt child almost every day for 25 years. When I first started dealing with the csa three months ago I had already processed much of what needed to be done. What was most healing for me was to in a way revert back to the time I was hurt and tell my mom how much I hurt and how I couldn't tell her what happened. I wanted to but I was too scared. This was a turning point for me as I said in another post it was a very healing moment as we cried together and she held me and told me it would be OK. I think thats what my past needed was for my mom to acknowledge the younger me, and to tell me it's going to be OK.I really don't care about being a "tough guy". I might be strong but I will never be a "tough guy"

Yikes! While I was away in Germany has there ever been a lot happening on the site, especially on this great thread! Can I add a bit more on this Inner Child business?

Therapists haven't invented the idea of the Inner Child, and in fact it seems to have originated in 1943 with a French pilot, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who was living in the USA at the time. He wrote a famous book called Le petit prince, which was translated as The Little Prince that same year. It's an absolute classic and has often been used in French classes in American high schools and universities. Although it's ostensibly about a child, the ideas and arguments are adult-oriented. It's a fantastic read and there's a good but not perfect English translation here. The book has wonderful drawings, some by the author, and the prince is believed to have been inspired by his own childhood memories and physical appearance. This is how he remembers himself in Chapter 2 :

How cool is THAT!!??

For me, the most important point that emerges from the book can be summed up in this passage (my translation ... to catch what the author means to say, as opposed to being elegant in English): "Here is my secret - a very simple one: it is only with the heart that one can really see. Things that genuinely matter are invisible to the eye." What he means is that the real significance of an event doesn't lie in the event itself; what counts is how we feel about it.

In psychology and psychiatry the notion of the Inner Child was then used by Eric Berne in his work on what he called "transactional analysis", the idea of which is that people relate to each other depending on where they are emotionally at that moment: parent, adult or child. (What he called "transactions" I like to call "negotiating".) He worked on this in the 50s, and he became famous for his book Games People Play (1964), a hugely successful popular version of his theories.

The idea was taken up from this background in a 1963 book entitled Your Inner Child of the Past, by W.H. Missildine, which is still a great read and can be had for a buck from Amazon! (not in our bookstore yet).

Discussions of the Inner Child aren't just attempts to blow roses around or make people feel good. There are a couple of important psychological/biological realities behind all this. One is that we are all fundamentally affected by things that happen in our childhood, which I think no one would doubt anyway.

But the other, less well known but very important for us, is that traumatic memories don't go into our brains in the same way or even to the same place as other regular memories do. Usually a memory is stored as a complete idea: thing that happened/time tag (when it happened)/meaning/our feelings about it. We have processed it, and even if it was something negative (death of a relative, getting told off, a fight that we lost) we will remember it perhaps with some twinge of regret, but it won't be able to clobber or harm us.

A traumatic memory, on the other hand, goes into a different part of the brain and tumbles in place in bits and pieces. It isn't processed or put all together and we haven't worked out what it means or how we feel about it. Our feelings are still as they were back when the event happened. In many cases there's not even a "time tag" on it, so we don't have it in our heads as belonging to the past. And these memories often can't be recalled on command; instead they are "triggered". For example, the abuser used a certain famous sweet aftershave; for a long time when I smelled that it would "trigger" me and I would feel this sense of terrible danger. For a time that could trigger me into a flashback: I would be 10 again, and there stands the abuser in front of me, as real as real can be (so far as I am concerned) - I can see him, hear his voice, everything. That's the vivid unprocessed memories surging back to me without any "tag" assuring me that this belongs to my past - to me it feels like it's happening right now.

So when we work on our Inner Child that's a way of thinking about all this that makes it easier for us to do the work. What we're doing is processing old traumatic memories, learning to assign them to the past, and figuring out how to cope with them now.

When we talk about "loving and caring for our Inner Child" we are really talking about learning to love and appreciate ourselves back when the abuse was happening - learning that it really wasn't our fault and accepting how innocence and defenseless we were. What a cool idea. I think we all deserve that.

Much love,Larry

_________________________Nobody living can ever stop meAs I go walking my freedom highway.Nobody living can make me turn back:This land was made for you and me.(Woody Guthrie)

Loving and caring for my "Inner Child" is very important for me. As an adult sometimes I'm tempted to end my life, I'm tempted to murder my perpetrator. But always I remember the promise I made to little me after I found out he had been sexually abused by his dad. He doesn't deserve to grow up as a future murderer or suicide, and I won't let it happen. He deserves the very best that love can provide. The adult who must care for that little boy now is ME, no-one else can do it. I've promised him I won't let him down like his parents did.

I LOVE these last two posts. This is what I have come to intuitively over the years of poking around in my head for answers. Man I wish I had grasped this a long time ago. This is a great thread and I may just copy the whole of it to my journal. Love you guys, big and little.

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